Route discovery within a communication system is well known. In particular, a message flooding procedure occurs that is often the basis of on-demand route discovery and network initialization. Message flooding is basically defined as a broadcast procedure covering a complete network. It operates as follows: When a node, or remote unit, in a network wishes to discover a route to another node in the network a message is broadcasted to all of its neighbors specifying the destination address. Upon receiving the message, all of the neighboring nodes will rebroadcast the message to their neighbors. When a node receives the same message again, it discards it. The procedure repeats itself until all of the nodes in the network are reached, or a time-to-live for the message expires. As discussed, the purpose to flood the network in a routing algorithm is essentially to find a path to send data to destinations. The message content is usually a request of route discovery.
Although message flooding is a dependable way to find a route within the network, flooding is proven to generate excessive amounts of system traffic and interference. In particular, the exponential increase of the signaling messages, due to the fact that every host in the searched area has the obligation to rebroadcast the route-discovery packet, leads to serious redundancy, contention, and collision. Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for route discovery within a communication system that minimizes system interference caused by message flooding.